


Outreach

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-03
Updated: 2019-11-03
Packaged: 2021-01-21 04:56:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21293924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: While working with the Adeptus Mechanicus to uncover the secrets of a world scoured by the Cicatrix Maledictum, a Techmarine of the Marines Malevolent muses on the future of his Chapter and how the Adeptus Astartes are - for all their brutality - defenders of mankind.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	Outreach

Falcons banked and soared in the afternoon’s fickle light, golden eyes darting for their high-altitude prey.

White pinions flared. Beaks snapped shut in scattering silver clouds of insects, morsels plucked from the atmos-swarms. Cries pierce the air, flavoured by the departing winter meeting summer’s oncoming warmth. Chemical smells still hang ripe and heavy as fouled fruit, but the prevailing scent is that of healing and recovery. Earthy loam and trade-winds free of smog and pollution.

Has it only been a century? A bare hundred years since the populace of Izumo fled the Eye’s opening, and already the raptors make their nests in cold chimneys and silent exhausts. The midges returned in pre-Imperial numbers.

It is as though the world has let out a breath held for a thousand years. Vines and foliage scab over the cities and industry, burying them in layers of environmental scar tissue.

To think of the planet as a living thing is to know fear. Fear that one day, on every other world thought safe, thought secure, thought chained and broken to the Imperium’s will, these sleeping giants will awaken. Awaken and exhale and roll their vast shoulders and shrug off civilisation. All the certainty of life would fall away, and all the heavy tread of humanity would be as nothing.

Techmarine Harpal did not know fear. Nobody would accuse a Space Marine of lacking courage. And still, behind the blank visage of his helm, he winced as the Mechanicus lander shook its way through the upper atmosphere, scattering the protesting wildlife in a violent descent.

He understood when it was best not to provoke a sleeping giant.

Aside from those Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes who had been condemned as _excommunicate traitoris_ and hunted to extinction, there were few that understood what rousing the ire of vastly powerful bodies meant better than the Marines Malevolent.

No allies to call on. No Forge World to make and repair their battle plate, to furnish arms and ammunition, to see to the vehicles and voidships that ferried the Chapter into battle. It wasn’t a death as direct as one at the eager hands of former brothers or the zealous Inquisition, but it was death nonetheless - slow, creeping, insidious. Death measured in bolt-shells and notched blades, drop by drop of irreplaceable blood.

Harpal had lived so long in the day-by-day that he had forgotten what it meant to do more than simply survive. Go here. Shoot this. Save what you can. That may as well have been the Chapter’s motto.

It almost felt like a betrayal to take a step forward rather than tread that comfortable water. But it was necessary. Unless he wished for the last of the Marines Malevolent to die, bloody and spitting ‘I told you so’ at the uncaring universe. As Captain Vale had said: that would be a pathetic legacy to have woven into their mortis-banner beneath the Golden Throne. It would be _weakness_ not to fight back with everything they had.

But grand words and gestures wouldn’t restore what years of desperation and stubborn pride had cost them.

_Who were we then? What are we now?_

Harpal clicked his suit’s vox onto a direct channel. ‘How goes the code sweep?’

‘Nearly complete, and eighty-three point seven per cent faster than initial calculations,’ came the buzzing response from an artificial voicebox. ‘Would it breach social decorum to request the providence of these cyphers? They are effective beyond the Astartes signifiers to the sixth iteration.’

‘I’m afraid their origin is a Chapter secret, Magos. As I’ve stated several times.’

‘I convey apologies. The malleability of base Gothic requires internal adjustment.’

It was impossible to be angry at the Mechanicus representative. It would be akin to kicking a canid. The Magos had been so delighted to have his request for Space Marine representation on the recovery mission that he had not made a single complaint about precisely who had answered the call.

Operating on the fringes of polite society had some benefit. The far-flung Magi were too distant from Mars to care much for the interminable politics and power-games of the Red Planet. Too distant, and too eccentric.

Some, of course, had been banished or exiled for their way of thinking, or for choosing the wrong faction in the endless upheavals. It was at the forges of these malcontents that Harpal had learned the basics of his craft, had cut his teeth working on projects that would have earned censure and demotion in the Machine Cult proper if not outright expulsion. There was lurid code in his implants and data-banks, scrap-viruses and kill-memes and worse -- and none of it was invisible to any trained adept of Mars.

So either Magos Chiaro had secrets of his own, or he didn’t care, or -- Harpal almost laughed to himself -- the old fool simply hadn’t been paying attention. It was likely the Magos hadn’t had cause to speak a word of Gothic in years, much less pass judgement on the quality of one’s code.

‘Anything still transmitting around the facility?’ Harpal asked, already suspecting the answer.

‘Looped distress recordings and vox ghosts. The evacuation was not one hundred per cent completed, but it is highly unlikely those that remained or their possible descendants could access or use the communications arrays.’

It was hard to imagine anything surviving the Maledictum’s wake. Those human thralls who had been abandoned would have gone mad, or mutated, or worse under lengthy exposure to the malignant Warp anomaly.

And any survivors would, of course, be less than welcoming to the return of those who had condemned them.

‘Harpal still couldn’t shake the image of some pale, wasted humans in tattered rags turning unbelieving eyes to the rust-red lander, tuning carefully-maintained vox-sets to any channel, begging and pleading for help that would not, could not hear them...

Living planets and impossible survivors. He shook his head.

‘Any servitor feedback? Security systems not accepting our codes?’

‘None, an oddity. Projections indicated that through survival procedures and cannibalism at least a quarter of the servitor staff should have remained operative. Responses, both passive and active, indicate much less than that.’

‘So we could’ve flown right in?’

‘Not at all. The passive responses are entirely security-related. Any interference with their operation would have initiated self-defence protocols, up to and including termination of the facility.’

‘Biological containment, I assume.’

‘That is a distinct possibility.’

Harpal blink-clicked the lander’s exterior feed to his helmet. It was a scene he was familiar with from pict-captures, though they had been taken at a time when the forges still thrummed with life and were not draped in heavy curtains of foliage.

The one exception stood out like the abscess it was. The return of nature would not do more than crowd its bleeding edges, a rusted nail driven deep into infected flesh. An imperfect cylinder that towered several stories above the surrounding, covered structures, protrusions studded it like cankers and boils: sensor pods, missile turrets, and other more esoteric devices.

None of the briefing papers, scant as they were, even guessed at how deep the facility was buried. Jointly held by an unidentified Space Marine Chapter and a Mechanicus organisation, even when Izumo had been occupied it had been a secret in plain sight, just one of many.

Secrets that killed, Harpal had no doubt.

He could make out freeways clogged with abandoned vehicles below the emerald reclamation. None was orientated towards the facility. Even as death approached, none dared called upon those within for aid or succour.

_We are the Imperium’s defenders, yet none here begged our aid. What does that say for those who manned these walls?_

It stung. For some reason, it stung.

Harpal had turned away refugees before. He had fired into camps of them, overrun by the enemies of mankind. He had ordered lethal gas deployed to ensure Genestealer infections were purged. There was no doubt that his hands were stained by atrocity. But each had been considered. He had done what he could when the option presented itself. For every moment he had been forced to sacrifice innocents to pragmatism, there were a dozen he had fought furiously in their defence.

To see not a single soul turn towards a fortress that held Space Marines, well, it hurt. On some deep, unidentifiable level, it pained him, and the realisation that such feeling had slipped through the chains of emotional control was disturbing.

He had undertaken this mission for the Marines Malevolent to begin mending their bridges with the wider Imperium. To acquire any weapons or armour that had been left behind in the evacuation, if possible. To ascertain Magos Chiaro’s usefulness or pliability for further co-operation.

And, most importantly, to look and see with inhuman eyes these cold remains of human misery.

Izumo was dead.

But in the Imperium of Man, nothing truly died. Even corpses had their place in the sepulchre of hegemony. There were lessons to be learned here, independent of the physical rewards.

Lessons, and names.

‘All cyphers have been accepted and cleared,’ crackled the vox. ‘We shall ingress via the upper thrall quarters, where potential damage can be assessed and facility power restored if necessary. Do you concur, Techmarine?’

Harpal nodded, though the Magos could not see the movement. ‘Good thinking.’

‘Prepare for inload. We have scraped some schematics from the few functional nodes.’

The promised data scrolled across Harpal’s field of vision: floor plans for sleeping quarters, common areas, food dispensaries - all the comforts that could be expected of a Space Marine Chapter’s servants, not the cold efficiency of the Adeptus Mechanicus.

An unfamiliar badge adorned many of the documents. Not that it meant much. The Astartes operated in the most dangerous and forbidden corners of the Imperium. Many of their Chapters were obscure, by necessity if not tradition - some simply had little to no contact with the empire, even if they had desired it. A solitary existence, manning walls where their deeds both foul and fair would never reach civilisation.

Still. The symbology of the serpent was not lost on Harpal. The iconography of slain dragons was common across the Imperium, the mighty Emperor casting down the snake of Chaos. Many were the myths and fables that featured the vile beasts, linking them to tragedy and destruction.

Myths allowed a glimpse of the truth. There were some events so culturally and intellectually devastating that they cannot be recounted wholesale. They were species trauma. They could only be threaded through in allegory and fable, in legend and rumour.

Besides that, the Marines Malevolent had a unique distaste for a certain species of salamander.

‘I am ready, Magos,’ Harpal said, with a final scan of the data. ‘Deploy the Skitarii. Let us see what secrets await.’


End file.
